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Upon This Patron's Shattered Oath: Part One
The Godmind was angry. No— was it anger? It had been so long. So long since he'd permitted his emotions to take shape, to coalesce into something more than the formless, nameless slurry of his subconscious...what did anger feel like? He knew it didn't feel good. And this didn't feel good. He knew that anger correlated strongly with frustration, with being stymied, with disappointment at himself and at the world. That, on its own, seemed reasonably strong evidence that this was anger. He still wasn't convinced. He didn't desire to do violence. He didn't yearn for confrontation, or thirst for vengeance. He was sad — he knew that one well enough, the opposite of content. But angry? He was moved to action by the things he saw, but he didn't lust for destruction to overcome his problems. If he could convince his foes to surrender with words, then that would be the avenue he took. That wasn't how angry people acted. Angry people wanted to see their enemies suffer more than they wanted to see them beaten. Right? 7140 hours. Almost two hundred ninety-eight days, locked in that prison. Iterius had promised to free him, from the very beginning; had sworn on his life and honor that the plan was foolproof. He'd said that Walter would be there, after everything was finished, and that he would press the button — with the rest of the crew either evacuated or destroyed by the ritual, that would make him the majority, and the Godmind would be released. Two hundred ninety-eight days was not long. The Godmind had been around for far longer than that, since Aroden's death almost 120 years ago. His constituent thirds, the Axiomite leaders whose minds had been merged to form him had been around for many times that. Two Thirds of him had witnessed the Earthfall. One Third had witnessed the rise of empires across Golarion many centuries before the mammalian precursor had developed opposable thumbs. Two hundred ninety-eight days was laughably trivial, a passing instant to a universe that included far more than just Golarion. So the Godmind found himself absolutely enraged that so much had gone wrong in his absence. He had people for this; servants he'd empowered personally to deal with exactly the sorts of disasters that had beset them. And one after another, growing more frustrated and sad and furious as he went, he listed them off: Omari Absalom, whom he had once expected would one day usurp the goddess Urgathoa as the most powerful undead in the universe — lost in the Boneyard when it was severed. Next on the list? Utnapishtim the Lich, currently trapped on an untraceable Black-Body Emitter as it sailed through space on an unknown trajectory. After that was Geb and his harlot — laughable by comparison, even if they could be convinced to serve — and then some nameless Winter Wight or something, and at that point, it clearly didn't matter. Crowe, one of the most talented mortal prophets the world had ever seen — soul trapped in the Astral Plane when it was severed, his body now long-decayed. It was unlucky enough to be suspicious, but not enough to warrant further investigation. Crowe had communed with the Astral Plane with moderate regularity, and it was well within the realm of possibility that he might have been doing so when Disavowment happened. He would hardly have been the only one. Lievargus, missing without a trace. He'd probably been on some extraplanar expedition, and now he would be trapped there for a very long time. It was possible that he'd detected that the Godmind had stopped watching him and so had taken measures to conceal himself in the event that He returned — quite likely, in fact. Lievargus had grown strong enough to make himself undetectable to all but the most coordinated of divination attacks. Regrettably, it was also quite likely that part of that concealment had involved him leaving the Material Plane. If he had, he wasn't coming back. There were others. Many others. It wasn't helping the Godmind's mood at all, regardless of which emotions he was or wasn't feeling. He realized that 7140 hours aboard that ship, at that speed, had been twenty years, here. He was still rather astonished that all of his servants had found so many opportunities to creatively disappear or die in such a short time. To him, twenty years wasn't so much longer than two hundred ninety-eight days. To them, apparently, it had been all the time they'd needed. He had eyes on the world. Trelmarixian was here, somewhere, and while the Godmind had overwhelmingly favorable odds against a single Horseman, gravely wounded, he doubted that Famine would have taken shelter without the other three to safeguard him. They would look to him for leadership, for guidance, in the wake of the destruction he'd wrought. They wouldn't let the Godmind just whisk him away. But if he had allies, if even one of his servants had survived, then it might be possible. So he had to keep searching. He would need new servants, and quickly. He needed them to be ready to fight as soon as he found where the Horsemen were hiding. Famine was the target — and twenty years or not, there was no way he had fully recovered from what Lynd had done to him. He wanted this to be a problem solvable by words, he wanted to think that he might convince Famine to simply give up, but they'd already had that conversation, two hundred ninety-eight days ago. And he had no intention of making the same mistake twice.